Having a deep understanding of your competitor’s online marketing strategies is a big part of ensuring that new customers are finding your business or brand first. In this post, I’m going to review a few of the best paid and free competitive analysis tools that will help you identify gaps, strategies, and stay one step ahead of the competition. SimilarWeb SimilarWeb has become a staple tool for competitive analysis. This robust tool allows you to analyze multiple areas of your competitor’s online marketing strategy and compare it to your own to find gaps and opportunities. I use SimilarWeb to help me understand where I should spend my time, i.e. which channels and strategies I need to investigate further. Here are just a few examples of reports you’ll find in the free version of the tool, along with the insight you can glean from each. All Visits – use this report to see your competitor’s estimated traffic in the last 6 months from all channels. Has their traffic increased, remained stable or decreased? Regardless of the answer to the question, the next question should be why? Engagement – this report...

As creators and authors we know that including rich media can work to make our content more interesting and engaging. While high quality images, memes and graphics all serve this purpose, did you know that most major social networks all provide options to embed public social content published? Embedding social content into your posts is a good idea for the following reasons: It can work to bring a conversation into your posts It’s an interactive element that encourages engagement from readers They can work to provide context to the topic or credibility by sharing content from a trusted source Can work to increase followers by sharing your own social content It breaks up large blocks of text It’s a smart way to repurpose your social content Now that we’ve covered why embedding your social content is a good idea, lets dive into some examples! 1. How to embed a SlideShare presentation SlideShare is an incredible platform for not only discovering new presentations, but also an effective channel for repurposing your own content to reach new audiences. All public presentations on SlideShare can be embedded by copying and pasting a...

Social content is increasingly being used by people to find information and purchase products. Search engines have embraced this trend and are displaying more social content and profiles into it’s results pages and the Knowledge Graph. Social content appearing in Google search results is nothing new. In fact, it dates back to 2009 when Google introduced an experiment called Social Search which added a new level of personalization to search results by including relevant content from social circles for signed-in users. In the same year, Google Real-Time Search was introduced which included timely content from sources such as Twitter and Facebook, but was discontinued two years later in 2011 when Google lost access to Twitter’s firehose (Twitter’s API that provided access to tweets as they are shared). Knowing that people trust recommendations from their friends and peers, in 2012 Google launched Search plus Your World which introduced Google+ posts and pages into signed-in users search results. Fast forward to the present it was announced in February 2015 that Google would once again gain access to Twitter’s firehose and tweets as they are shared in real-time. In this post, I’m going to...

As business owners and marketers, we know providing answers to our existing and prospective customers’ questions about our products, services, or solutions is an important part of acquiring and retaining new business. Providing easy to find, clear answers to these questions enhances the visitor experience and works to establish expertise, authority, and our websites as destinations. No one understands this better than Google. Lets rewind to September of 2013, when Google overhauled their search algorithm which was referred to as the Hummingbird update. Hummingbird represented the largest change to Google’s search algorithm in 12 years and is part of Google’s plan to become less reliant on keywords. Shortly after the release of the new algorithm, Google searchers started noticing small answer box type results appear for various types of queries that included everything from vs. type searches to questions such as “how to boil an egg?” and “who is the Secretary of State.” These new results showed Google directly answering searcher queries using data from its Knowledge Graph and through having a deeper understanding of the contextual meaning of webpages. So just how many answer box results are there? At...

If you look back at the digital marketing industry prior to 2012 and compare it to what it is today, it’s fair to say that much has changed. Most of the change that has occurred in the SEO industry over the past few years has been positive and has encouraged businesses to provide a better overall user experience through design, content, and community. The way people search for products and the devices and mediums they use to find them are constantly evolving, which represent a continuous opportunity to find and reach new audiences. With this in mind, here is a look at five key areas of focus for 2015, plus two areas you shouldn’t worry about too much. 1. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Search Mobile surpassed desktop searches last year, and both searches and purchases on mobile devices will only continue to grow rapidly. Recognizing this change in searcher behavior, Google had been making a concerted effort to educate and inform webmasters on optimizing for the mobile user experience. For example, recently we have seen Google release mobile-friendly labels in mobile search results, send mass notifications regarding mobile...